E-Mail This Article to a Friend Talking the talk Anthony DeCurtis’s art of the interview BY TED DROZDOWSKI
	IN OTHER WORDS: ARTISTS TALK ABOUT LIFE AND WORK By Anthony DeCurtis | Hal Leonard | 504 pages | $24.95

Anthony DeCurtis’s In Other Words is proof that celebrity interviews can run deeper than Jessica Simpson explaining she doesn’t know how to use a washer-dryer. Johnny Cash and Bono discuss religious faith. Iggy Pop offers a skeptical take on his cultural impact and bemoans modern American rock as "guys getting their dicks hard with machine aid." Nile Rodgers lays out the egalitarian social politics of disco and the thinly veiled racism that dismantled the music and the movement. Here too is the full-length interview for the New York Times in which Rufus Wainwright detailed his drug-fueled descent into "gay hell," and DeCurtis’s tense discussion with Eminem, who was taking heat for his gay-bashing lyrics at the time, and sweetly ironic experiences like sharing conversation and a pack of cigarettes with George Harrison in the former Beatle’s idyllic garden years before he died of lung cancer.

DeCurtis has had A-list access for decades as an editor at Rolling Stone and Tracks, director of VH1 news, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, but this book gets as much juice from his gently thoughtful manner of questioning as from his connections with celebrity. Although he’s known for his music journalism, he’s also a pop-culture junkie who can slip into the worlds of Don DeLillo, Al Pacino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme as easily as that of Keith Richards. Even with the defensive Eminem, his belief in the interview as a conversational rather than a confrontational art comes through.

Yet he’s comfortable challenging assertions. When Phish’s Trey Anastasio, insisting that it "always sucks" when retired bands re-form, is informed by DeCurtis that the Clash were considering regrouping before Joe Strummer’s death, he retorts that it would have been a nightmare. "You don’t want to see the Clash again, do you?"

"Um . . . ," DeCurtis begins.

"Do you? You kind of do!", Anastasio interrupts. "But do you want to see them do ‘London Calling’?"

"Of course," DeCurtis replies. "What would you want them to do? . . . You can call it nostalgia, but if you go see the Rolling Stones, they’re still great. Bruce Springsteen getting back with the E Street Band is another example. In a culture in which things so often seem disposable, that was a statement that things can last. It was also a statement about community."

The book’s sole throw-away is an interview with Lucinda Williams that sheds light on neither her nor her art, but the abundance of small revelations more than compensates. DeCurtis’s discussion with Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry focuses on his upbringing as a poor, simple farmer’s son and is full of tearful reminiscences. DeCurtis confesses that he’s "not much of an ironist. Irony too often seems merely cute or smug." Perhaps that’s why he draws so much out of Ferry and also David Byrne. He belongs to a different club, so they need to relate to him on less codified, more human terms.

Conducted in 1984, his interview with Byrne elicits a prophetic observation: "I’m worried about this country. . . . The quality of life and the quality of manufactured goods, and politically, everything seems pretty poor at the moment. . . . When you compare this country with Japan, and the educational system and all those kinds of things. . . .it’s hopeless. Unless really radical things are done, this country is gonna be down there with the third-world nations we’re invading. I don’t have any foolproof solutions. From our point of view as a band, I suppose our political statement is that we’re evidence of people working together and doing something that has, we would hope, some kind of quality in it, and yet isn’t elitist. That’s the best we can do as a band at the moment: be a living example."

Anthony DeCurtis | Borders Books and Music, 10–24 School Street, Boston | September 20 | 12:30 pm | 617.557.7188